Apple’s iOS 10.1.1 update is causing huge battery life problems for some users

No OS update is ever perfect,
but Apple’s iOS 10 initially launched to strong reviews and fewer
reports of problems than we’ve seen with some of Apple’s other launches.
The recent 10.1.1 update, however, appears to be causing problems. A
number of users are reporting drastically reduced battery life and much
higher device temperatures.

Part of the problem appears to be related to battery charge monitoring — News.com.au
quotes one user as saying: “It jumps from 30 per cent charge to 1 per
cent in a few seconds then shuts down. As soon as it reboots after
connecting to a charger it show 30 per cent charge. When I unplug it
right away it still shows 30 per cent and runs like nothing happened for
a good few hours.”

I’ve seen this happen on my own iPhone,
particularly as the device has gotten older. It’s not uncommon for my
phone to display irregular behavior — dropping extremely quickly at some
points, and then reporting a steady charge level at a given value (60%
and 29% appear to be particularly favorite sticking points for my own
device). My significant other’s device has a similar problem. That said,
this isn’t a new issue for either of us, and it doesn’t appear to
affect the overall battery life — just the displayed battery level.

“Massive reduction in battery life” wasn’t on the feature list.

Some iOS users who also develop for the platform have tried to isolate the problem, with no success. One Hacker News commenter writes:

[M]y iPhone 6 has gone from being needing to
be charged every 1.5 days to at least 3 times a day minimum. It also
runs extremely hot a lot of the time, regardless of how many or what
apps are running in the background… the phone’s “Battery Usage” list is
useless, as it shows things like Mail being used for 3 minutes, and
using 25% of the battery power since last charge. Varying apps are
listed as huge battery sucks even when I don’t think they are
(Calculator anybody?!?) At this very moment, it is saying that Apple
Remote took 26% of the battery charge, Messages took 11% and the Home
& Lock Screen took 9% since last charge – about 30 minutes ago!

Things that I expect to suck up the battery, like the Moves app, says only 2%.

I’ve even plugged my phone into my PC and gone
into XCode to check the logs to see if anything is standing out, but
nothing in the logs point to a particular app or process chewing battery
time.Immensely frustrating. Another dev friend of mine has said
that the iOS 10.2 beta has fixed most of his problems, so I may download
that from our developer account and see if it works… I have done a full
factory reset on the phone and restored from iTunes backup twice now,
with no improvement at all.

The problems don’t seem limited to any
specific iPhone model or feature, and there’s no known cause or solution
as of this writing. Apple pushed two versions of iOS 10.1.1 — the first
release dropped on October 31 and a second version of the update was
released on November 9. Apple hasn’t disclosed any reason for the second
push, however, and it only went out to owners who hadn’t previously
downloaded 10.1.1. If you’re using 10.1.1 (either flavor) have you
noticed any problems?